Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

In an example of the unique partnerships that can arise with cloud computing, Jive Software is making SAP BusinessObjects' On Demand suite available to customers of both the on-demand and on-premises versions of its collaboration software.

The deal, announced Tuesday, means that Jive users can select SAP BusinessObjects' Crystal Reports, Xcelsius dashboards, Web Intelligence, and the recently announced Explorer -- an in-memory enterprise search tool -- as modules to their Jive on-demand subscriptions or on-premises licenses.

This means their IT departments won't have to arrange for separate licenses or subscriptions for BI tools that people want to use in their companies' Jive-based wikis, and should make it easier for different types of users to get online with such tools.

One of Jive's first customers for the offering is CSC Consulting, an IT services firm with 90,000 employees worldwide. Some professionals with the firm plan to use SAP's on-demand BI tools to analyze and share information on Jive related to how knowledge is disseminated throughout the organization.

The strongest areas for analytics use within Jive include sales, marketing, product innovation, and employee engagement (such as analysis of how employees are using software), said Chris Morace, Jive's senior VP of products.

Mani Gill, VP of SAP's BusinessObjects On-Demand, said the deal helps bring BusinessObjects into the 2.0 world of collaboration, where things such as forums and blogs are "1.0 community stuff."

"The opportunity we see here with Jive is it can actually innovate our on-demand offering," he said. SAP envisions customers being able to pull data from, say, a CRM system, analyze it with BusinessObjects On-Demand, and collaborate on it in Jive. "There's a real opportunity to take BI to the next level," he said.

With the announcement, SAP also said it'll offer an on-demand version of Explorer for use in Jive. Announced last month, Explorer is designed to let nontechnical employees search large amounts of data within their organizations using natural-language questions and keywords, and get results back within a few seconds. They can then view that data and compare it with other rapidly retrieved data, using bar graphs and pie charts.

The product is a combination of the Polestar user interface developed by SAP's Business Objects business; SAP's in-memory database, BW Accelerator; and the SAP-developed T-Rex search engine.

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